by Zamil Akhtar
I didn’t need much blood. On the silk was perhaps a nosebleed’s worth. I brought the kerchief to my mouth and licked. A storm of spice and metal, like a coin doused in tamarind. Unpleasant on my tongue, but Vera wasn’t lying. This was conqueror’s blood.
I’d only tasked her this morning with getting more. How had she delivered so fast?
“Which part of her bled?” I asked.
Vera fingered her bottom lip. “Right here.”
I’d noticed Cyra biting her lips in the great hall. Could be nerves got to her, and she bit down too hard.
But Vera’s cheeks had turned from strawberry to pomegranate. Why was she blushing?
“You seem a bit too happy about this,” I said as I followed her avoidant eyes.
“I’m just pleased to have served you, Sultana of Sultanas.” Said so musically.
Perhaps her methods were better kept secret, like mine. I couldn’t begrudge that — secrets often were our survival. “You’ve served me well, dear. I won’t forget it.” I gestured with my head toward the door.
After she’d left, I soaked the handkerchief in water for a minute, then rung the reddish liquid into a cup. Good thing about blood: it’s mostly water, so adding more water, up to a limit, was a handy trick that allowed you to write more runes with less blood.
If only conqueror’s blood flowed in my veins. How sad that I possessed the blood of seekers, considering my ancestors were of god’s blood, among the thirteen rare flavors. Perhaps the rarest, but all thirteen were nearly impossible to find now; the baser flavors diluted them into extinction.
Once I’d poured Cyra’s blood into a tiny perfume bottle, off I went.
I would place this rune in the wine cellar, a few minutes’ walk from my room. No concubines went down there, but eunuchs and handmaids did all the time. It was a cool, damp, sour-smelling place full of stacked barrels and bottles. No one would notice it, surely.
Once there, I dabbed my finger in the bottle, as if it were ink, then wrote the pattern of souls as delicately as I could in a crevice behind a barrel stack that smelled of fermented barley. It resembled an eye within an eye. I whispered the incantation, “O’ Morning Star, give it life, as you gave life to us.” The bloodrune glowed for the briefest moment, as if the Morning Star were saying I have heard and I have given.
I bumped into Cyra on the way back. A tooth-sized gash ran across her bottom lip — it looked deeper than a nervous bite. I pointed to my own lip and said, “What happened?”
She darted her eyes and said in a single breath, “Oh, uh, I was slurping stew and bit myself. How careless. So shameful.”
Bit yourself…while slurping? Well, it was from the horse’s mouth, so I supposed that mystery was solved. “I was just about to have coffee. Care to join?”
She nodded. The bulging bags beneath her eyes made plain her sleeplessness and worry. She also seemed oddly demure as we sat at a low table in the harem’s dancing hall. Cyra kept her back toward the dancers and flute players — she’d seemed uninterested lately with the usual entertainment.
I said what was on my mind, “That was nice of you, returning a gift in kind.”
With a half-smile, she replied, “That’s how I was raised.”
“Lovely Crucian girl. So young. Kyars will be overjoyed.” Should I have pretended to be jealous? I couldn’t care less whom Kyars fucked, since the man’s seed was as bereft as the Zelthuriyan Desert. Rather, it was Cyra’s motives that concerned me. Or, more specifically, the motives of her taskmaster.
“I hope so,” Cyra said, eyes distant.
“What’s wrong, dear?” I put my hand on hers.
She pouted and said, “I’m worried about my brother. And Shah Tamaz.” Her voice cracked. “It seemed like it would come to blows earlier. I just want their standoff to end.”
“You’re the one thing they have in common. Surely you could bridge the divide.” Although that was the last thing I wanted.
She shook her head. “Me? What do I know about politics, about justice, about any of it? I’m just an ignorant girl from the Waste.”
Several of my daughters suffered from similar self-doubt. Hadrith clearly understood how to take advantage of a girl’s weakness, which made him annoying, if not dangerous. Not only did Cyra possess conqueror’s blood, making her useful to me, she’d been tutored by the same Philosophers as Kyars for the past eight years. And yet, unlike the Seluqals, she didn’t have these luxuries at birth and so would, naturally, have unsatisfied yearnings. It seemed Hadrith knew how to tug at her hungers. I was neither towering, bearded, nor brimming with gold, so couldn’t compete.
Now a dilemma presented itself: encourage her weaknesses, or reassure her strengths? Build her up or break her down? I didn’t need the competition. Hadrith was already a pest, and with Cyra bolstering his agenda, it could endanger everything I’d suffered for. Everything I cared for: bringing back the Children, staving off the Great Terror, my fiery aches for vengeance — it all barreled through my mind during this one, hesitant, painful, bitter gulp.
“Cyra, dear, you’re like a diamond that thinks it’s quartz. A baby lion that, only because it’s small, believes itself to be a street cat. You’re not ignorant, nor are you weak. You’re everything you need to be. I’m sure if you speak with your brother, speak with the Shah, we’ll all be better for it. You don’t know your own strength until you try.” I squeezed her hand. If only I’d said such things to my daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters while they still breathed.
She shut her eyes as tears streamed. I’d touched her heart, it seemed. “You really think so?”
“I know it, dear.” I wanted to ask her about Hadrith and her feelings for him. But how without revealing that I’d been spying on them? Hadrith and Cyra rarely met in the open, so I wasn’t supposed to know. Could I coax it out?
“Cyra, ever thought of finding a husband?” You’d think, given our friendship, we would’ve already discussed this topic. But both Cyra and I kept private about that sort of thing. Me, for obvious reasons. I wasn’t sure why she’d never brought it up, though.
“Of course I have. I’m almost twenty-four. But no one’s made an offer.”
That, I found hard to believe. Hundreds of viziers and pashas would want the hand of a khagan’s sister for their sons or themselves. Alanya was full of wealthy merchants, Philosophers, sheikhs — all who would’ve noticed a girl like her.
“Have you ever asked Shah Tamaz if someone has made an offer? He’s your guardian so it would be directed to him.”
“Wouldn’t he have told me?”
“Not necessarily, if he didn’t consider it appropriate. You ought to ask him.” I raised a playful eyebrow. “Unless…you yourself have someone in mind?”
Dimples formed on her pinkening cheeks as she smiled. “Well, maybe. I mean, I don’t know.”
“For Lat’s sake — who is it? You can’t keep it from me!”
She sat straight and brushed stray hairs off her forehead, a rosy vigor in her expression. “All right — it’s Hadrith.”
Now…what ought I do. Encourage this awful union, or lace it with doubt? A friend would encourage it, but Hadrith was sniffing around and had the power to destroy everything I’d built. What would I say if Cyra were my daughter?
“If that works out, we’ll be seeing even more of each other,” I said. “He and Kyars are such good friends. Best friends, even. And so…very similar. In good ways…and some not-so-good ways.”
A frown snapped onto her face. “Like what?”
“Well, like, last week…umm, you know, I shouldn’t say. Never mind.”
She craned forward. “Tell me.”
I clasped my hands. “I was on my way from the Grand Bazaar and saw Hadrith coming out of…”
“Coming out of what?”
“You know.”
“A pleasure house?”
I nodded.
Cyra glanced away, from sorrow more than surprise. “He meets all kind
s of folks, Hadrith does. Sometimes he has to take viziers or ambassadors to those places, to make deals and such.”
“You’re right. Although, there was also…”
Cyra thudded her elbows onto the table. “Also what?”
“The other day, I saw him with the Grand Admiral’s daughter — you know, the girl with fire-red hair. Half Karmazi. They seemed…”
“Affectionate?” Dread drenched her voice.
“I’d use…a stronger word.”
There. Her pupils enlarged with sharp rage as she slouched again. Seemed I’d succeeded.
“You’re trying to dissuade me,” she said. “Why?” Or perhaps I hadn’t…
“No dear, I’m not—”
“Are you jealous?”
I could see her fist under the table.
“What? No, I’m just looking out for you.”
“No you’re not. I think you know how powerful Hadrith is, and you don’t want me anywhere near that kind of power. Because then it would rival yours.”
Ugh. Frustration welled in my tightening chest. I’d miscalculated. Perhaps I underestimated her raw ambition, and now a conversation that had started so well was going all wrong.
“Cyra, I just want you to be happy.”
“Tell me this — are you happy?”
I shook my head in a moment of honesty. If only she knew the depths of my despair.
“Happiness is for fools,” she said. “For drunks. For pleasure-seekers. I’m not after happiness. I grew up in a place where entire tribes would fight to eat rats. Then I was brought here and given everything one could imagine.” We were more similar than she’d ever believe. “Want to know why Shah Tamaz hasn’t found me a match, despite my age? Because, at the end of the day, I’m his hostage. And what is a hostage for, if not a bargaining piece to be sacrificed when needed? Do you think I’m not aware that if the Sylgiz do attack, he would use my life to buy time for your beloved and his gholam to return? Do you think I’m not aware I could be strung up in a noose?”
“My dear, I didn’t—”
“Hadrith — for all his terrible failings and flaws — can save me from that. Will save me from that.”
“Don’t you know he’s using you!?” I blurted out. So rash of me to reveal what I wasn’t supposed to know. “You talk about being a bargaining piece, but what are you to him? Just a pawn, to be sacrificed all the same.”
“That’s what you think of me?” She sniggered, colder than ice. “The way you seduced Kyars — think I can’t do the same to Hadrith? You really do believe you’re better, don’t you?”
“I didn’t seduce Kyars! I’m nothing. I’m a slave, for Lat’s sake!”
Cyra shook her head and chuckled. Then she swallowed hard and said, “Right, but you’re the mother of his only son. Your status will never be questioned, from now until little Seluq dies of old age, and by then you’ll already be long in the grave. Your life is secure — how nice for you. Don’t get in the way of me securing mine.”
Curse the saints! She’d completely misunderstood my concern. Not unlike my own daughters, to be fair.
“What did you just say?” she said, eyebrows high in surprise.
“Huh? I didn’t say anything.”
“You just said ‘curse the saints.’”
Oh Lat, I’d said what I was thinking out loud, hadn’t I? “No, you misheard me.”
“I heard you quite clearly. ‘Curse the saints.’ Are you…Path of the Children?”
I shook my head a bit too fast. “No, of course not, that’s heresy.”
“And yet, I heard it from your lips.”
I had to think of something. Anything. “My mother was. She used to say it all the time. ‘Curse the saints.’ Sometimes when I’m stressed, her words just…come out of me. I don’t know why.” Not a complete lie, actually.
Silence lingered. Then Cyra nodded. “My mother was…is, too. My whole family, in fact.”
No. The Sylgiz were not truly Path of the Children. They cursed the saints and revered the Children, but in all the wrong ways. Because the right ways had been eradicated. How disappointed I was to learn that one of the few tribes that claimed to walk the straight path was also far astray.
“Do you still believe it?” Cyra asked.
“No, of course not. The sheikhas made clear how absolutely heretical it all is.”
“But you’ve only been here a year or so. Surely, in your heart, you must still believe some of it.”
“It’s forbidden in Alanya.”
“I didn’t ask if it was forbidden. I asked if you believed it. Are you waiting for the Guided to come out of occultation? For the Gate to open, and all that?”
Those were the wrong beliefs. The Children never spoke of a gate or of someone called the Guided. Inventions ascribed to us by people who were trying but didn’t know better. Still, those who called themselves Path of the Children today were better than these saint worshippers by their intentions alone. If I succeeded in restoring the true Path of the Children, I prayed they — and everyone — would flock to it.
“No!” I said. “It’s all nonsense. I pray to the saints, like everyone else.”
She sighed, almost disappointed. Then she bit her lip — where that gash was — and nodded. “I have an idea.”
She pushed up and rushed toward the double doors.
“Where’re you going?” I asked.
She turned around, reinvigorated and rosy. “Outside the city. To talk with my brother. Please, forgive my rude outburst. Thank you for the coffee, and the conversation, dear friend. I’ll see you soon, all right?”
Perhaps sooner than she realized.
What had I done? What was Cyra going to do? In order to learn just how badly I’d messed things up, I sat in my closet and forced my soul into the drongo. Glided from what must’ve been the second heaven — where the sky was bleak and cloudless — to the clouds and below. I drank deep of the air and witnessed the world in its endlessness. And then, with a straight-down dive and a flutter, I landed atop a yellow yurt at the outskirts of Qandbajar.
Around me, the Sylgiz went about their late afternoon tasks. How they lived reminded me so much of home — relaxing, working, and bathing beneath the sky, lambs roasting on spits, four times more horses than humans. But I couldn’t enjoy the nostalgia. Voices sounded, showing Cyra and her brother alone in the yurt below.
That she was allowed to leave the city and visit her brother any time showed how much Tamaz trusted her. Perhaps I could exploit that trust for my own end, but that was a thought for another time.
I peeked through the hole at the top, where the stove’s chimney would be if this weren’t such a hot season. The pair sat beside each other, on the floor, like a brother and sister ought to.
“Why should I even let you walk back into that mud heap?” Cihan said. “You belong with us, Cyra. I don’t blame you for how they changed you. I blame Father for being weak and letting them take you.”
“You want the truth?” she said. “I won’t ever come back. Not because I don’t love you, not because I don’t love my people. I miss Mother. I miss…almost everything.” Her voice trembled. Was she targeting his sympathy with her tears? “But one thing I don’t miss — the cold. I don’t ever want to be cold again.”
“You’re staying here because you hate the winter?”
She nodded. “Isn’t that why you’re here, too? Winter is three moons away. I know what you want, Cihan. Father always talked about it. ‘We ought to be like the songbirds,’ he’d say, ‘and find a way south, singing all the while.’ But the Alanyans would never allow it. You’ve come for land, not justice, and you’re trying to see just how far Tamaz will bend.”
Clever girl. But there was no chance Tamaz would give the Sylgiz land. She needed a better strategy to counter what I’d set in motion.
Cihan said, “It’s not just the cold. A year ago, the deep tribes started migrating south, bringing their heathen ways with them. Some eat their dead. Oth
ers ride mammoths into battle. The Endless was always dangerous, but now we can scarcely spare a night in peace. Though the Sylgiz are stronger than before, we’ve more enemies than before, too. With the deep tribes uniting against us, I don’t think it will hold.”
How ominous. One khagan or another was always trying to unite the tribes to push south. Knowing the people of the Endless, you’d have better luck uniting the fish in the sea, though Seluq the Betrayer had united all the fish and sharks and dolphins and even the corals, to stretch that analogy.
“I don’t claim to know everything,” Cyra said, “or much at all, really. But I know that in Alanya, everything has a price. Whether its verses, spices, slaves, or land.”
“We don’t have nearly enough gold to pay for the land we need. I was hoping to set up trade here so we could earn more, but someone beheaded our trade delegation, as you know.”
Cyra shook her head. “When has gold ever been our currency, brother? We have something that the Alanyans would pay half the world for. And the other half, too.” She was smiling, wasn’t she? Too bad I could barely see her face at this overhead angle. “As you well know, Alanya doesn’t have a coastline anymore on the Yunan Sea. Ethosian pirates, remnants of the same army that Kyars defeated last year in Sirm, have taken every seaside fort and city. Winter is three moons away. There’s no way the Crown Prince and his gholam can take all that coastline back. At best, one or two forts, which the enemy could reoccupy once they leave.” This girl had more knowledge than she let on. Skill with the tongue, as well.
“You’re saying we help them?”
“No. I’m saying you agree to drive the pirates out, and as your reward, the Shah gives you the coastline to protect on his behalf.”
Now that was an idea — farfetched, but I respected the tenacity. Tamaz would never agree, though.
Cihan grunted. “Tamaz will spit on that. We’re too different from the Alanyans. He might give us some bereft mountain if we drive a hard bargain, but the western coastline? The moon will split before that happens.”
“I believe he’d rather you have it than the Ethosians. But you’ll have to do one more thing for him. A big thing.”
